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When you erase a test score and write in a new one for your own benefit, that’s cheating, right? So what is it when you do this several thousand times?

Ofqual, the British education standards regulator, “secretly downgraded the GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education test] results of thousands of pupils to avoid public fury over dumbed-down tests,” reports the Daily Mail. “Fearing a row over inflated results, Ofqual’s chief executive ordered all exam boards to cut the number of pupils getting top scores just two days before marks were finalized.”

The argument for national education standards is based on a host of unexamined and incorrect assumptions. One is the belief that the authorities overseeing such standards (and associated testing) will have truth and transparency as their only motivations. As the above example illustrates, that’s rubbish. Bureaucrats and politicians are as self-interested as the rest of humanity, and they do, in practice, consult their own interests in the execution of their duties.

The way to deal with this reality is not to ignore it – as national standards advocates and other statists are wont to do – but rather to adopt systems for structuring human action that take it into consideration. In the context of education standards, that means leaving the standards-setting process to the competitive marketplace: make it easy for all families to choose whatever schools they deem best, allow schools to administer whatever curriculum and whatever tests they want, and allow higher ed and employers to weigh the value of the various standards and certifications that arise. Lousy standards that don’t reflect real achievement won’t be valued, good ones that do will be.

National standards advocates are right that children should be encouraged to do their best and that every child’s diploma should really mean something. But that doesn’t mean that every diploma has to mean the same thing. A competitive marketplace for education standards and testing would ensure both quality and relevance, while also allowing for the fact that very different students heading toward very different futures may want to strive to excel in different areas.